Saturday, March 09, 2013

In years past I have not been much interested in sociological jurisprudence. It seemed to me that talk about social forces, social interests, social preferences, etc., as a basis for legal interpretation (or lawmaking) lacks theoretical rigor. But I now find that I am somewhat attracted to the idea of some kind of sociological jurisprudence when I ponder the "logic(s)" of factual inference and proof in legal settings.

That's in part because I think (contrary to some or much rational choice theory?) it does make sense -- and it is necessary -- to think and talk about the "purposes," "functions," "interests," "preferences," etc. of societies and parts of societies (including systems of legal proof) and that it is not enough to conceive of the "interests" and "preferences" etc. of social groups as being nothing more than an aggregation of the interests, preferences, etc., of the individual members of such social groups.

I also think a connection must be made between logic(s) in the abstract and the logic(s) that is (are) in actual use in societies and their parts: we need to look in part to how lawyers, judges, jurors, etc. actually reason and deliberate about matters such as evidence and facts. But, if possible, an attempt to link logic with actual legal practice, or conventional legal practice, should be done in a way that tends to preserve (so to speak) the logical character(s) of the method(s) of reasoning and deliberation that is (are) customarily used in investigation and proof in trials and other such legal settings. Is this possible? I propose to find out. (More accurately said, Joannes Pilapil and I will try to find out.) Hint: I suspect it is possible.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Senator Rand Paul is more intelligent than many people seem to think. Even though he has no formal legal training, his analysis, during his filibuster, of Due Process and the Fifth Amendment right to life was excellent. Oh, and by the way, his discussion of the danger of the notion of a temporally and geographically unlimited "war on terror" was pretty good too.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Lofti Asker Zadeh

Lotfi Asker Zadeh -- Computer Scientist and Mathematician

The Father of the scientific concept,"Fuzzy Logic", as well as "Fuzzy Sets" and "Fuzzy Systems"

You've likely heard of the term "Fuzzy Logic", or "Fuzzy Mathematics". But despite what their names may imply, there is nothing inexact about these scientific concepts were formulated, says Lotfi Asker Zadeh, the famous UC Berkeley University mathematician and computer scientist who coined the names of these theories and spent a career advancing their applications.

Known as "The Father of Fuzzy Logic",Lotfi was born in 1921 in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan to an Iranian father (a journalist) and a Russian mother (a pediatrician). In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, he moved with his family to Tehran, Iran where he was enrolled in Alborz College (an American-run Presbyterian school), where he was educated for the next eight years. In 1942, he graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering and emigrated to the U.S. the following year, enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Why He's Important: While a professor and scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, he published his seminal work on "Fuzzy Sets" in 1965 in which he detailed the mathematics of what he called the Fuzzy Set Theory. In 1973, he formally proposed his theory of "Fuzzy Logic", which, based on precise formulas, began allowing scientists, mathematicians and others to make accurate, realistic research data decisions when working in environments of incomplete information, uncertainty and imprecision. Fuzzy Logic does this by allowing for approximate values and inferences as well as for incomplete or ambiguous data (fuzzy data) -- instead of relying solely on crisp data (binary yes/no choices).

Other Achievements: Fuzzy Logic and his Fuzzy Set theory in general have been applied to numerous fields – from computer technology and control theory to artificial intelligence. Lotfi is also credited, along with John Ragazzini in 1952 with pioneering the development of the z-transform method in discrete time signal processing and analysis. These methods are now standard in digital signal processing, digital control, and other discrete-time systems used in industry and research. His latest work includes computing with words and perceptions.

Education: Lotfi received his Master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946, and his Ph.D in the same discipline from Columbia University where he taught for 10 years before joining UC Berkeley in 1959.

In His Own Words: Commenting how he came up with the name "Fuzzy Logic," he says: "I decided on the word 'fuzzy' because I felt it most accurately described what was going on in the theory. I could have chosen another term that would have been more 'respectable'. For instance, I had thought about using the word 'soft', but that really didn't describe accurately what I had in mind. Nor did 'unsharp', 'blurred', or 'elastic'. In the end, I couldn't think of anything more accurate so I settled on "'fuzzy'".

At age 92, Dr. Zadeh still remains active in his field. He serves as an editor of the International Journal of Computational Cognition, and his website at UC Berkeley lists him as Professor in the Graduate School of Computer Science. In addition, his Facebook page reports that he still goes to his office at UC Berkeley everyday whenever he is not out of town at national or international professional conferences.

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Jurors in Jodi Arias' murder trial have submitted about 100 questions they want put to the accused killer on their behalf, the judge said Tuesday.

"I just received some additional questions from the jurors," Judge Sherry Stephens said in court as the questioning of Arias by her defense lawyers and the prosecutor finished. "It looks like we have probably a hundred questions."

Arizona is one of three states that allow jurors to pose questions to witnesses after prosecution and defense lawyers have finished their questioning.

Monday, March 04, 2013

The following fellowship at Stanford sounds like a marvelous opportunity for someone (and I wish I were young enough to take advantage of it):

CodeX - The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (http://codex.stanford.edu) is accepting applications for a Resident Fellowship for the 2013-14 academic year. CodeX is a cross-disciplinary research center jointly operated by Stanford Law School and the Stanford School of Engineering. The center's mission is to explore the application of technology toward improving the quality, efficiency, and accessibility of the legal system. Codex research fellows will have the opportunity to spend one to two years at Stanford Law School collaborating with scholars in computer science and other relevant disciplines. Fellows will work on the center's existing projects, and will have the opportunity to explore related research on their own and commence new projects. Fellows will work with cutting-edge technologies emerging from Stanford's engineering departments, and will be expected to bring a legally oriented perspective toward integrating these technologies into the law. Fellows will also be involved in bringing in leading thinkers in the field to speak at the law school on these topic areas and will work with law and computer science students to engage them in the center's activities.

Qualifications:

Because the primary focus of the center is employing technology within the law, applicants should also have experience in the legal, computer science or engineering related fields. We welcome applicants with practical/professional technical experience in these fields as well as those with formal legal, computer science or engineering undergraduate or graduate training. Applicants should be capable of learning and be comfortable with the technological aspects of the center's projects.

How to Apply:

All qualified and interested applicants must apply via the Stanford jobs website: http://jobs.stanford.edu/ search for this specific posting by entering job number: 51463 in the keyword search field. Applicants should submit:. a resume. a brief letter (no more than 2 pages) describing the applicant's interest in issues applying technology to the law, the applicant's background, and the research that they propose to conduct. a list of referencesReview of applications will begin immediately, and all applications must be received by March 31, 2013. For more information about the Stanford Codex Center please visit the website at http://codex.stanford.edu, or contact CodeX Executive Director Roland Vogl at rvogl@law.stanford.edu.

I enjoy watching, on C-Span, the authors who say they had to leave academia to do the thinking and writing they want to do. (Of course, the authors who appear on C-Span are those who managed to make a go of it: we are witnessing a kind of victor's history.)

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Although I have raised a number of questions a number of times -- see, e.g., this blog post and this one -- about the evidence used in some or much American civil litigation (and in some criminal cases) for alleged abuse by Catholic priests of minors, it is of course true that some Catholic clergymen have engaged in improper and sometimes illegal and sometimes criminal sexual misconduct. See, e.g., Accused Scottish Cardinal Admits Sexual Failings, NYTimes (March 3, 2013). (But I do not know whether Cardinal Keith O'Brien has been accused of improper sexual behavior toward minors or whether he has only been accused of acting improperly toward adults.)

This book examines circumstantial evidence in the context of its utility
in investigation and prosecution of corruption cases in Tanzania.
Circumstantial evidence has not been given the due prominence it
deserves under traditional common law. In this book, the author
expounds and articulates the efficacy of circumstantial evidence in the
dispensation of corruption cases in courts of law. The emerging approach
of circumstantial evidence is intended to cure the current weaknesses
of investigation and prosecution of corruption cases--a daunting task
for all law enforcements and courts who regard direct evidence paradigm
as more reliable than circumstantial evidence. The book provides a
strong case for circumstantial evidence approaches to improve the
effectiveness and contribution of the legal system in the fight against
corruption.

I’d like to begin with two different ideas of truth. The first appears to be the simplest: “It is true that 1+1=2.” The second is from the beginning of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Now, these sound like quite different ideas about truth. But the process of trying to teach computers to understand truths like these—difficult for both notions—is revealing the ways in which they are similar.

The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1955 by a computer scientist named John McCarthy. Early on, McCarthy enunciated his key aim as the systematization of common sense knowledge. In 1959, he wrote: “[A] program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficiently wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.” This has proven very difficult, primarily because it is difficult to encode, in a systematic fashion, what it means to say something is true.

About Me

Student of the law of evidence, evidence, inference, and investigation. Sometimes writes books. Sometimes writes articles. Sometimes tinkers with computer programs to support the marshaling of evidence for legal activities such as trials and pretrial discovery and investigation. And sometimes takes photographs.